Ideally, you’ll ask your question on your own website and send me a webmention to have the question appear in the comments section below where I can then answer it. If your site doesn’t support webmentions, you can ask your question and include the permalink for this page on it and then webmention me here manually. If you prefer to remain anonymous you can probably use the service CommentParade. You can always go old school and just ask your question in the comment box below as well. I’ll also accept emailed questions which I’ll post without the personally identifying information of the person making the query.

Chris, I have been investigating bookmarking lately. I noticed that you trialed Radio3 a while back. I like what it offers in regards to syndication, but was wondering if there was a way of doing the same sort of thing in WordPress? That is, post a ‘Like’ on my site, but publicise the original link? I guess I could do this manually, I was just dreaming of something a little more automated?

Aaron, I’ve been watching some of your bookmarking explorations and more closely contemplating some of my own. For “publicizing” the original link there are a few things you can do. I know you’ve come across my use of the PressForward plugin. It does a solid job of pulling in the entire post, which you’re bookmarking/liking/favoriting/etc., and allowing you to forward to the original canonical URL by setting an auto-forward time within the plugin. This allows you to syndicate your bookmark/like/favorite/other out to places like Twitter, Facebook, et al. and then when users click on those links, they go to your website which then in turn forwards them back to the original. This is much like the way linkblogs worked in the early 2000’s (John Gruber/Daring Fireball was one of the first to do this as I recall) and is pretty similar to the way some bookmarking sites like Diigo or Reading.am work to forward you to content. When I checked last there were a few linkblog-esque plugins in the WordPress repo that did similar things, though none that did exactly what I wanted them to. Since the code is all open source though, you could extract the portions you need and bend them to your will if you liked/needed.

Another option is to set the canonical URL for your post to that of the original you’re bookmarking, which will push the “credit” to the original. Some popular plugins like All In One SEO Pack allow you to do this. PressForward goes one step further and physically redirects people from your permalink to the original.

One of the things I liked about PressForward and syndicating out was that it allowed my site to garner the traffic and referral links to the things I bookmarked as well as to collect the webmentions and potential conversations from social silos. Because my original post always forwarded, those conversations were only viewable (by the public) on the silos and not my site. I suppose sometimes you’ve got to take what you can get.

I’m sure there are solutions beyond this, but there haven’t been many experimenting with them lately to my knowledge. Welcome to the bleeding edge!

Part of the point and beauty of the IndieWeb movement is that you can choose any platform or set up you choose! There are far more options than just Known and WordPress. The harder problem is is to figure out what it is you want to do online. Then you can find, build, or find and build a tool that best suits those needs. If you need help, feel free to try the chat rooms at https://indieweb.org/discuss.

Kim, There are interesting pieces of functionality out on the web that are easy enough to replicate, and I thought that Webmention would be a good fit into an AMA workflow. I didn’t “need” to do it so much as “wanted” to while I was participating in a friend’s AMA on a major platform.

As for the socks: a brand new pair of black/grey Puma athletic socks–yes they match!

Look at Glenn with the webmentions turned on!! We should definitely put something together for November in Riverside. Let’s chat this week and brainstorm a bit on what that might look like. Perhaps a call tomorrow if you’re free? I haven’t seen a closing date for proposals, but we should try to turn something in relatively soon.

Depending on how deep you’ve gotten into things, you might be interested in attending (remotely) IndieWebCamp NYC this Friday and Saturday. They should have some reasonable remote participation options on Friday and Saturday that are sure to help get our creative juices flowing.

I spoke to Various about this on Sunday and he said that the 27th (this Thursday) was the deadline for submissions.

I’m in the Pacific Ocean today (Tue) and at School tomorrow (Wed)… I probably have some talk time tomorrow… or maybe we can sort something out here online. I think the proposal could be pretty simple, and then if we get selected we can flesh out greater ideas/details.

I’ll take a look at IndieWebCamp NYC… sounds very interesting! Will you be going?

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